"Armies resemble the fashion industry in their susceptibility to trends, and health aficionados in their quest for symmetry."

--

Dennis Showalter

La Triviata

Reportedly, a certain German general once commented
that his Supreme War Lord, Kaiser Wilhelm II, could not “lead three soldiers
over a gutter.”

After the siege of Sebastopol in 1854–1855, some
100,000 human skeletons were sold by the Tsar to a firm in Britain which processed
them into fertilizer.

Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of Great Britain
from 1957 to 1963, had served as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during World
War I, suffering his third wound during the battle of the Somme,
after which he was found by a stretcher party ensconced in a shell hole quietly
reading Aeschylus, in the original
Greek.

When Alexander the Great circulated to the Greek cities
a request that they proclaim him a god, the Spartans passed a resolution
declaring, “Since Alexander desires to be a god, let him be a god.”

Hanna Reitch, Hitler's favorite "girl" pilot,
had a long-term torrid relationship with Luftwaffe
Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim, and the two flew out of Berlin together at
Hitler's orders, in her airplane during the final hours of the Reich.

In 1800, the purchase price of a captaincy in an
“ordinary” British cavalry regiment was £2,782, while annual pay was only £266 5s.

Despite claims --
then and even now -- by some very air-minded commentators and historians that
the inter-war Navy was hostile to aviation, the proportion of personnel in
naval aviation grew from about 2 percent of total manpower at the beginning of
the 1920s to 20.4 percent in 1939.

In 1945, a Philadelphia
newspaper ran a picture of two pet baby skunks who had been named
"Hitler" and "Mussolini," which prompted numerous protests,
on behalf of the skunks.

In late-1917, the First Sea Lord (CNO), Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, proposed that the
Allies undertake a naval offensive in the North Sea to capture Helgoland and the
Wangeroode Islands and block the exits from German ports and rivers by
scuttling 83 old warships, a plan to which the U.S., France, and Japan objected
because they would have to supply two-thirds of the obsolete vessels.